from the where-else? dept

This should hardly be a surprise, but with Twitter being so popular lately, it was only a matter of time until it was targeted in patent infringement lawsuits. At the very least, the company suing them appears to (a) actually be based in Texas and (b) have a product on the market. But... that doesn't make TechRadium's lawsuit against Twitter any more reasonable or sensible. Take a look at the patents in question:

Read through the claims on each of these patents and try not to gag on the obviousness of all three. If you picked any competent programmer (or, should we say, one who is "skilled in the art") and discussed messaging systems, this is pretty much what any of them would develop. There's nothing particularly unique or special in what's described in these patents. And, now, unfortunately, Twitter needs to waste time and money defending itself for doing something (ahem) obvious.

from the quite-some-time,-it-seems dept

Late Friday, the news broke that TD Ameritrade is the latest in a long, long, long, long, long list of companies who have leaked data of its customers. In this case (as in many others) it was apparently due to their computers getting hacked. Considering how many similar stories we see, it almost didn't seem worth writing about. However, it appears that Ameritrade was well aware of the hacking long before they disclosed it. According to a lawsuit that was filed months ago, Ameritrade users had been receiving stock spam to unique email addresses provided only to Ameritrade as far back as October of 2006 -- and some of those users had reported this to Ameritrade. Then, back in May, Slashdot ran a detailed piece on the apparent leaking of Ameritrade email addresses, and even questioned why Ameritrade had not disclosed this breach, as is required under California law. The lawsuit, filed at the end of May, questions this as well. Yet, Ameritrade waited until now to disclose that their systems had been hacked, making email addresses available to people. Amusingly, Slashdot's report on this fails to note Slashdot's earlier story that helped spur the lawsuit and apparently pushed Ameritrade to finally investigate the claims. Either way, it raises questions about why Ameritrade waited this long to inform its customers that their emails had been leaked, despite pretty clear evidence of a leak from quite some time ago.